Bobcat Goldthwait Unleashes the Darkly Hilarious Misfits & Monsters on TruTV

Nearly all the anthology series that have been produced for television in the wake of The Twilight Zone have carried a satirical undercurrent, reflecting back the absurdities of the current era through ironic storytelling or something closer to reportage. What sense of humor was apparent through these programs tended to be fleeting or pitch black.

Bobcat Goldthwait’s new truTV venture Misfits & Monsters flips the proverbial script. As with the feature films that he has written and directed, including the 1991 cult favorite Shakes The Clown and 2006’s Sleeping Dogs Lie, the core of the stories that he tells with this new series are dark, but their most overt quality is that they are incredibly funny and deliriously absurd.

In the debut episode “Bubba the Bear,” Seth Green plays a voice actor stalked by the foul-mouthed physical manifestation of a beloved cartoon who is angry at how he’s being portrayed. In a later installment, Goldthwait pokes fun at celebrity culture with a mockumentary on the career of a vapid teen pop sensation that literally sold his soul to the devil (played with unctuous glee by Michael Ian Black) in exchange for singing talent. (Satan also happens to be banging the pop star’s mom.) The corollaries to real life figures are evident but incidental to the laughs he and the actors wring out of every moment.

The concept for the show is something that Goldthwait has been sitting on for a while. Inspired by his love of Twilight Zone and a desire to challenge his abilities as a director and storyteller, he’s been offering it to networks for the past seven years.

“People would always say, ‘What would you do if you had your own TV show?’” Goldthwait says. “And I’d tell them this is what I’d do and basically they wouldn’t even validate my parking. But thanks to Black Mirror, people know what an anthology series is now. Doing a TV show gives me an opportunity to tell a whole bunch of stories and to challenge myself.”

Telling eight individual tales was daunting enough, but Goldthwait and his team pushed themselves to give each episode its own distinctive look and feel. “Bubba The Bear” has the tone of a creepy horror film where the sanguine early scenes of Green entertaining a group of schoolkids belie the tension and small shocks coming up later. Another installment, “Face In The Car Lot,” has the sweep of a great ‘70s drama like All The President’s Men blended with the mood of a chintzy low-budget monster movie.

The inspiration behind each episode is often spelled out by the filmmakers and actors at the end of the half-hour, which features behind the scenes footage and interviews. It’s through the short segment following “Bubba” that we learn that the story was, in part, a reaction to people still only remembering Goldthwait from the outrageous persona that he used for his early stand-up appearances and Zed, the character he played in three Police Academy films.